The 1920s belonged to Buster Keaton. In addition to Seven Chances, the comic genius also released the cowboy classic Go West.

Keaton plays a small-town boy who gives up on New York City and tries his luck out west. His accidental success makes full use of the fish-out-of-water premise.

His character gets in a shoot-out, herds cattle, falls off a train, befriends “Brown Eyes” the cow, fights off train bandits, and works to save the farm. His attempts to disguise the cow as a bull is a highlight.

Yes, a silent Phantom of the Opera. It’s almost unthinkable after Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical. But this silent horror classic was made back in 1925 — just 15 years after Gaston Leroux’s novel was first published.

The film starred “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” Lon Chaney. Chaney famous devised his own ghastly appearance for the film and managed to keep it a secret until the premiere.

“I achieved the Death’s heard of that role without wearing a mask,” Chaney said of his makeup. “It was the use of paints in the right shades and the right places – not the obvious parts of the face – which gave the complete illusion of horror.”

This is one of the great adventure classics of the 1920s. The Lost World featured state-of-the-art stop-motion animation, which wowed audiences and still has an effect today.

The film is based on the 1912 novel by Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame. The intrepid Professor Challenger leads an expedition to South America in search of dinosaurs and other creatures who are supposedly extinct.

Fun fact: The Lost World was the very first in-flight movie. It was shown to passengers on an Im[perial Airways flight between London and Paris in April 1925.

Back when Charlton Heston was just two years old, this adaption of Ben-Hur starring Ramon Novarro was conquering the globe. MGM marketed it as “The Picture Every Christian Ought to See!” and it was the studio’s biggest international hit for at least 25 years.

The religious epic tells a Jewish prince who comes into contact with Jesus Christ during his adventurous life. It was the first feature-length film based on the 1880 novel by Lew Wallace of the same name.

A word of warning: More than a hundred animals were killed and countless others harmed in the making of this motion picture. At least the producers won’t be making any money when you watch it now.

The Soviet film’s bloody Odessa Steps sequence is one of the most famous in all of cinema, inspiring directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Terry Gilliam as well as painter Francis Bacon. The scene shows soldiers and Cossacks violently attack civilians – including an older woman wearing a pince-nez as a baby carriage rolls down the steps.

The artistic masterpiece helped popularize Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering use of montage. In the century since its release, it has become a film school staple. Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and Charlie Chaplin have all called it one of their favorites.